Room With A Grue

On the most basic level playing a videogame is like experiencing architecture. It’s that core interactivity that makes the difference. Little wonder that video game developers work so hard to create realistic gamespaces. Few things are more immersive than guiding your character through a fully realized universe. This doesn’t mean we aren’t looking for great story or boffo gameplay. But just as often as not, it’s the setting, the world, the gamespace that keeps us playing, drawn to that altered state that only gaming can provide.

Diary of a Mad Gamer

Spring 2002: For most of this otherwise dismal yearMorrowindhas been my best friend and only consolation. I spend my evenings wandering the island of Vvardenfell, exploring the halls of the fierce Redoran clan, levitating through the phantasmagorical mushroom houses of the Telvanni mages, squatting in the rude tents of the nomadic Ashlanders. I love nothing better than to poke around dwarven ruins and daedric shrines, dank sewers and unmarked caves. Tonight, after several close encounters with daedra, bandits and clannfear, I find myself standing on a nameless hilltop gazing out at the coastline, watching the sun set over a distant village. I have spent the last three hours scrambling from hill to hill, sliding down cliff faces, darting through valleys, always working toward higher ground for no other reason than that it is there. I remember touring a cathedral in one of Europe’s great cities. I see a flock of cliffracers heading my way. I shoot an arrow at the closest, cast a levitate spell and leap into space.

Summer 2003: To my everlasting regret I have come to realize that I am not going to finish Ico. Me and the PS2 controller can’t reach a truce and so I’m going to call it quits and return the console to the friend who lent it to me. I have a pang of conscious as I pack it up. Scenes from the game come back to me, especially of that terrible, fog-shrouded castle with its massive walls, soaring parapets and endless rooms. Standing on a balcony looking up at another balcony on the next tower over. Calling to Yorda, taking her hand. Circling back down the steps, dizzy from the heights. Hours later, we step out onto that higher platform. I have spent half a morning crossing a distance a bird could fly in a few seconds. This castle is a real place and not just a series of levels stacked one on top of another. I think I will miss it. No, I know I will miss it.

Fall 2004: The Ravenholm level of Half Life 2. “We don’t go to Ravenholm” I was told earlier in the game and now I know why. There is nothing else like it in the entire game. I’m creeping down ill lit passages, sprinting down blood-stained streets and up stairs clogged with shambling zombies. I jump out onto catwalks of rotten boards as the zombies moan below me. I scramble over rooftops my heart beating, my skin crawling. It’s all so tight, dark, and closed in. Everywhere you turn there is nowhere to turn. An entire city transformed by the Combine into monsters. If Half Life 2 is a house of horrors then Ravenholm is its deepest, most frightening room, its dark heart. It’s at once slow and fast. Dread-filled and bristling with sudden death, Ravenholm leaves me wrung out but excited. It’s one of the most compelling gaming experiences ever.

Half Life 2.

Morrowind.

Ico.

Masterpieces of gaming. Games burned into my memory. Some finished, others not. But here’s the thing. If you ask me what I was actually doing in any of these games at any point in time I couldn’t tell you. Ask me to explain what my immediate quest was and I will shrug and shake my head. Plot? I don’t remember. Character? Hmmmm, I sorta remember the main one. Puzzles, tactics? Sorry. Interface or controls? Can I use one of my life lines? But ask me about the setting, or what the game looked like. Ah…that I can tell you. Where should I start? After thousands of hours of gaming this is what really sticks with me: The sensation of moving through space. The experience of light and shadow, color, sound, and surface textures.

And this is what this article is about. The space in which we game.

Space is the Place

In the spirit of first things first, let’s rewind back to one of the most influential text based games ever created, Zork. Zork was my introduction to gaming and my first experience of that uncanny sensation of moving through virtual space. You type “west” to move west, “south” to move south and so on. Early on the game tells you there is an oil lantern on the floor in front of you. You type “get lantern”. Imaginary lantern in hand, you explore a vast underground kingdom, creeping through “twisting passages”, spacious chambers, and caves. Lose that precious lantern or let it burn out and grues will eat you. Grues are nasty monsters that live in the dark, in the unimagined spaces at the edges of your game world, if you will. Let the light go out and they will attack and tear you to bits. Anyone who played Zork for over five minutes learned to map their progress on paper, graph paper preferably, in effect drafting an elaborate floor plan of the game as they progressed. I played this game compulsively, stealing away whenever I could to get in another hour of Zork. My friends were stumped. How could it be that a person who couldn’t sit still for ten minutes of Monopoly or Risk, who hid in closets and under porches rather than get dragged into another game of Hearts or Scrabble, was suddenly found at 3 am, at his desk in his pajamas, tap, tap, tapping away at his keyboard. It sure as hell wasn’t the story or the characters. And the gameplay was tepid at best. No, it was the allure of that dark underground world unfolding before me, a world that captured my imagination despite a total lack of graphics. Simply put, Zork engaged me. I was able to use my imagination in an entirely new way. It was something new. It was interaction with an-until-then-unknown part of my imagination. This was nothing like the way people devoured fiction or movies. Instead of identifying with a character from a distance, from the outside, I acted for the character. I became complicit in that character’s fate. In Zork I quickly learned that if I wandered too far and let that lantern burn out, I died. But if I solved the puzzle and figured out how to open a new area, I lived to play on. Though this game was nothing more than glowing green words on a small CRT screen, it contained worlds.

Over the next decade personal computers and console performance improved nearly exponentially. Game developers began using more graphics in games. Though these first generations of graphic video games offered little more than animated wallpaper, gamers were all open arms. Wasteland, that post-apocalyptic pater familias to the legendary Fallout series, served up little more than a 2D map, some text and a small window on the upper left hand side of your screen with a crude picture of the current setting or character of interest. Using a text menu and a mouse cursor, you moved your party across a bomb-blasted terrain, fighting off enemies and exploring locations. It was so simple, so crude, but so compelling.

It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation. A prehistory of video and computer games might take us through the evolution of paper mazes or board games…but ultimately, what we remember is the experience of moving around the board and landing on someone’s real estate. Performance theorists have described RPGs as a mode of collaborative storytelling, but the Dungeon Master’s activities start with designing the space – the dungeon – where the players’ quest will take place. Even many of the early text-based games, such as Zork, which could have told a wide array of different kinds of stories, centered around enabling players to move through narratively-compelling spaces: “You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all of the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees.” The early Nintendo games have simple narrative hooks – rescue Princess Toadstool – but what gamers found astonishing when they first played them were their complex and imaginative graphic realms, which were so much more sophisticated than the simple grids that Pong or Pac-Man had offered us a decade earlier…

Though gamers tend to consider placing too much emphasis on game graphics as missing the point, (and they are right…pretty sunsets alone will not a great game make) it’s important not to lose sight of what graphics have historically meant to gaming. As game technology advanced, the push toward ever more realistic graphics, or eye candy if you will, became, for better or worse, the standard by which games were measured. You can easily trace a line from Zork (1982) to Wasteland (1988) to Doom (1993) to Grim Fandango (1998) to Deus Ex (2003) to Bioshock (2008) or any half dozen games of your choice and the one thing that remains constant is the increasing sophistication of graphics. Through the years, the quality of story and gameplay mechanics rises and falls but the quality of the graphics continually evolve. And hand in hand with graphics, came realistic, nearly photo realistic, depictions of gamespace.

Before I get much further I want to make it clear that this is not some manifesto or lame proclamation that the experience of moving through a game’s environment is the most important part of a game. That would be silly, not to mention impossible to support. Various combinations of story, character, and gameplay mechanics make or break a game. Always have. Always will. No, my point…(I hear sighs of relief out there)… is that the space in which we act in games is often taken for granted or dismissed as just part of the window dressing. I think gamespace is more important than we have realized.

In the above quote Jenkins goes onto discuss how we find stories inside the space of the game instead of having them told to us. It’s a great read and it helped with my own thinking on this stuff. I encourage you to check it out if you’re interested. But I’m not going to talk about any of that. I don’t have the time, the space or the brainpower. No, I’m more interested in how gamespace relates to a specific art form, one that, more than any other art form, anticipated “audience” interactivity.

Architecture.

Architecture is the art form closest to the gaming experience, not film or fiction, not painting, photography or sculpture. Only architecture completely enfolds us as thoroughly as gaming.

Experiencing Architecture

There is a great little book out titled Experiencing Architecture which is on a lot of reading lists for introductory architecture classes. It was written in the late fifties by Steen Eiler Rasmussen and is perhaps a little dated by now but still worth the read. In it’s first chapter, Basic Observations, on page 33, Rasmussen writes:

It is not enough to see architecture; you must experience it. You must observe how it was designed for a special purpose and how it was attuned to the entire concept and rhythm of a specific era. You must dwell in the rooms, feel how they close around you, observe how you are naturally led from one to the other. You must be aware of the textural effects, discover why just those colors were used, how the choice depended on the orientation of rooms in relation to windows and sun…You must experience the great difference acoustics make in your conception of space: the way sound acts in an enormous cathedral, with its echoes and long-toned reverberations, as compared to a small paneled room well padded with hangings, rugs and cushions.

Moving through the interior of a well-designed building is a sensual experience. Ceilings flow past overhead, hallways recede, walls spring up around corners or materialize at the end of long corridors. Small rooms hug you close, making you feel safe and protected. Great halls soar up and out and away, filling you with awe and wonder. Voices ring out harshly or arrive softly hushed. Light paints patterns on floors and walls, floods in from skylights. Grand staircases drop you into opulent lobbies as your fingers glide over polished banisters. There’s something so satisfying about moving through space, something so deeply human. People are in constant motion and when we are told to sit still, we can’t. We fidget, we fuss. Spatial sensation is so seductive. Space wraps around us, makes us feel more real, more solid.

In this way, architecture is pure interactivity. In film, painting, literature, theater and music we are mostly “looking at” or “listening to”. Sure we interact in as much as we interpret what we see and hear. Sure, we create meaning through interpretation and draw emotions from meaning. Still, this is all so abstract. We don’t open doors in a song, we don’t turn the corner in a book. We don’t mount a flight of stairs in a film. While these art forms confront and engage us they don’t envelope us, not in the same way as architecture does. They just don’t provide the same bone-level, bottom-line sense of interaction as architecture.

Or as gaming.

On the most basic level playing a videogame is like experiencing architecture. It’s that core interactivity that makes the difference. Little wonder that video game developers work so hard to create realistic gamespaces. Few things are more immersive than guiding your character through a fully realized universe. This doesn’t mean we aren’t looking for great story or boffo gameplay. But just as often as not, it’s the setting, the world, the gamespace that keeps us playing, drawn to that altered state that only gaming can provide.

So this is the deal. This is where gaming and architecture trade spit: In the realm of interactivity. This matters because, more and more, what appears to be emerging from our modern pop culture experience is the rising importance of interactivity. From call-in voting on mega hit talent shows to charting reactions to presidential candidate’s delivery during debates to fancy names for game design course tracks at famous Southern California universities, interactivity is what’s for dinner.

By this point you are no doubt thinking, “holy hell, Scout is writing a goddamn thesis here”. Not really. I’m more or less feeling my way through the fog, trying to make sense of this nagging thought: How the experience of the spatial in gaming heightens interactivity and how this relates to architecture. Looking around I suddenly see this idea everywhere, prodded and poked on blogs, explored in theses and exhaustively mined in books.

I could go on and on here but think you get the point. Still….I do want to mention one of the coolest architectural projects that never got built. It’s call the Fun Palace and it was dreamed up by the visionary architect Cedric Price. Price had one of the worst designed-to-actually-built ratios in modern architecture but he was no less influential for it. He unveiled the plans for the Fun Palace in 1960. It was commissioned by Joan Littlewood, theatre director of Theatre Workshop in east London. Dubbed a “laboratory of fun”, it was envisioned as a huge, unenclosed grid work with movable gantry cranes, the types you see in a shipyard. The cranes were to shuffle around prefabricated walls, floors, ceilings, stairs and stages that could be somehow fitted together as needed. Among other things, it was a huge influence on the architects of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the modern art museum in Paris. The Fun Palace’s core mission was to respond to the desires of its visitors.

Here’s a quote from the marketing material:

Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.

You could reasonably claim that Rice, in effect, envisioned a three dimensional sandbox game, one that has no set story, no predetermined agenda, only an environment that responded to its user’s desires and whims. The most mind-blowing thing of all is that Price’s design called for it to be dismantled at the end of ten years and the site restored to it’s original state.

All Good Things…

I recently reviewed The Path, an odd little adventure game by Tale Of Tales. In the review I wrote that The Path was a sort of anti-game, a game without a gamespace. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I believe there is a gamespace in The Path. It’s inside your head. We all carry a small universe up there after all. The best games draw upon that interior world and make it part of its gamespace. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sucked us in it not so much with its story, or with any revolutionary gameplay but with its atmosphere and setting. The gamespace in STALKER is called the Zone and that is just such a perfect metaphor for what I more and more think I am looking for in a game. The feeling of inhabiting a zone. That ineffable experience of traveling through a magical realm that exists nowhere else but inside a video game and sometimes in an unexpected bit of architecture.

This reminds me of yet another game. I’m thinking of the opening scene of Bioshock. After plunging from the sky into a burning sea, and after pulling myself onto a small rocky crag jutting up in the middle of nowhere, there it was. The latest version of the white house in an open field. I went into the little building, down the twisting passages and into the diving bell. As Andrew Ryan’s voice drilled into my brain I began my descent toward the undersea city of Rapture. The first glimpse was so thrilling, so perfect. Those narrow, needle-like skyscrapers distorted by the blue clear water, the neon softly diffused, that huge whale drifting across the bottom of the frame…I couldn’t wait to enter Rapture and it wasn’t to hear Ryan’s story though I was intrigued, and it wasn’t to kick some splicer ass though I was eager. No, it was the city of Rapture calling out to me, its walls, floors, chambers and halls. I wanted to roam it, claim it, make it mine. I just had time to glimpse the words above the airlock, All Good Things of This Earth Flow Into the City. Then I was swept through the glass tube and into that great ruined metropolis. I was back in another fantastic realm, another alternate universe a mere key stroke from this one. I was inside, my lantern lit, my fingers tensed on the keyboard, the grues growling in the darkness beyond. I smiled and knew I was home.

About the author

Mike "Scout" Gust

Based in Portland, Oregon, Scout – aka Mike Gust – works in the film business, writes reviews for Tap-Repeatedly and doesn’t mind the endless, ceaseless rain. He reads, hangs out with friends, plays video games, drinks too much coffee, listens to old records and watches lots of movies. He enjoys baffling performance art, getting checks in the mail, and looking for his glasses. Scout has yet to have his photo taken with a famous person.

25 Responses to Room With A Grue

Davo06/02/2009

Scout,

Great article. For me, an example of a game series that has, at times, perfected the art of drawing gamers into its architecture is Tomb Raider. The character of Lara Croft has received all the attention, but it’s the architecture and the environments that are the star of the show in the Tomb Raider series. At its best, the spaces in Tomb Raider are breathtaking. I still remember playing the first game in all its jaggedy glory on my Playstation and staring in awe at the lost valley with its crumbling temples and fallen pillars. The designers of the first game had a solid grasp on maximizing the impact of a space, and I think the lost valley level captured their achievement in all its glory. I have vivid memories of sprinting through the valley gunning down velociraptors with lichen-covered rubble as a backdrop. Above me, a wood and rope bridge beckoned. I raced toward that bridge KNOWING it would lead to more hidden spaces filled with mystery. Then I stopped in my tracks as a Tyrannoasaurus roared toward me, and here’s where the designers’ grasp of architecture reached its full brilliance. As I turned and ran, I looked at the architecture now not for its design glory but for its potential as a hiding place.

At its worst, however, the Tomb Raider spaces have served as nothing more than repetitive filler. I know a lot of gamers think the series reached its zenith in the second game, but I absolutely hated Tomb Raider 2. The level that killed me was the four-part overturned ship, with its exceedingly boring primer-red walls that appeared over and over again. This was a complete lack of appreciation for the use of architecture in a game, in my opinion.

The newer Tomb Raider games have gone a long way toward recapturing the architectural glory of the first game with their stunning graphics and monolithic levels.

Thank you, Scout, for a beautiful essay. You capture perfectly something I’ve always wondered about – why the “space” of the game is so important. And reading your piece, I come to the realization that gamespace is important because we are spatial creatures, and our surroundings are constantly influencing us. To achieve true immersion, a game must make you forget this reality and fully marry the one it presents. And only with effective environments can this be accomplished.

I know nothing about architecture, but I see its relevance in game environmental design. I recall that Bungie’s Oni was the first game (or at least the first to advertise the fact) to build all levels in consultation with architects. In addition to making structural layout more logical, it aided immersion because I was able to immediately relate to the space.

Such a terrific article. We may need a follow-up one of these days.

Mike "Scout" Gust06/03/2009

Thanks all. There is certainly a lot of stuff being written on this angle. And it does feel “right” to me that gaming draws from architecture in a way it doesn’t from other art forms. Yeah, I will probably do a second part down the road after letting it sort of simmer for a while.

Helmut06/03/2009

Great article scout. I wonder how many people who read this site have drawn their own Zork (or Dungeon) maps. I certainly did. I’d sweep through the office at my first job with an inch of fan-fold computer listings in order to wow the boss, then plunk down at my desk and flip my printouts over to reveal my mega masterpieces of mapping. We did the same for Ultima V’s multi-leveled, multi-entrance caves. When the worlds got too complex and Doom and System Shock had auto mapping the mapping portion of my brain died.

When I stepped out of the healing chamber in System Shock and I read the system log describing the levels of Citadel Space Station, my heart leapt, but it was a tempered leap. Don’t get your hopes up, surely it can’t be that good, I thought likely only a little of it is accessible. Of course, it was all that and more with believable work, mechanical, and living spaces. Finding work logs that were dropped near bodies in plausible work spaces and in last ditch closets and cubbyholes give them more believability and impact.

Software and architecture share the concept of pattern description languages. The practice of software pattern description is based on the idea of architectural patterns (which I believe came first) and I’ve read The Timeless Way Of Building linked at the bottom of the Wiki.

People are crappy at thinking logically, middlin’ at handling digital information, but when the information channels open up and a person can absorb information from their surroundings in analog ways, they can be very perceptive and engaged in the environment. Most people can tell instinctively when entering a house where the ‘life’ is, it’s the same force that makes all the people at your party collect in the kitchen space leaving the ‘living room’ empty. Spaces that work for an intended purpose have been examined and can be described in the above pattern languages and designing a good space suitable for its use is not a black art.

I believe that good architecture in game level design leads to an immediate head start in getting a person hooked because it allows believability and credence at a fundamental human level. Good architecture throughout a game leads to the process you’ve described of transitioning from one memorable space to another. Poor architecture (such as Doom 3) where the levels are filled with nonsensical machinery, or padded out with endless complexity is as painfully obvious as the nerd sitting alone in the living room.

GregP06/03/2009

I too thoroughly enjoyed this article. For me my favorite games and/or levels (System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Thief 3’s Cradle, STALKER) have been equal parts excellent storytelling, gameplay mechanics, and atmosphere/environment. STALKER, in my mind, is the pinnacle of atmosphere/environment/architecture goodness, as the gameplay is mostly pretty standard fare, but the FEELING I get when I walk/run/crawl around The Zone is just indescribably addictive.

For years now I’ve had the desire to make a level for a game, and it’s been my appreciation for outstanding examples of good architecture and level design that create memorable gameplay experiences, that has driven it. I’ve yet to really give it a shot beyond messing around with various level editors. But I’m thinking about picking up Nitsche’s book tonight … maybe that’ll finally push me into doing it.

Pokey06/03/2009

Great article, Scout. I play games because they transport me to some amazing and exciting places and let me experience things I never would in real life. The pictures of Morrowind and especially ICO make me want to go there and see what might happen.

lakerz106/03/2009

Scout, you are a true wordsmith. That is the ultimate compliment I can give you. Your latest essay truly resonated with me, the examination of “gamespace” and what it does to our inner mind and emotions. Much like you, I revel in a game world that just sucks me into the atmosphere and refuses to let me out until the sun is rising in the morning and I’m forced to go to work. It’s funny that you mention ICO because as soon as I read the opening paragraph of your essay my first reaction was OMG! ICO! And crazily enough, I never managed to finish the darn game either! I got pretty far, but this one part just had me so frustrated trying to beat off all the monsters and not fall and die and keep Yorda from getting killed I just couldn’t take it anymore. I *will* come back to someday though…I still have the saved game on my PS2 memory card. 😉 But my memories of exploring that castle will stick with me forever.

lakerz106/03/2009

I almost forgot to mention, this is why I also dislike games that put time constraints in during the game play. I hate being hurried from task to task and place to place because often I want to take my time and soak in the surrounding…poke around here and there and see what I can discover. I almost feel cheated when I’m not allowed to take the time to do this. 🙁

My first job out of college was an entry level position at a game development company. During my 1 year there, I got the chance to spend time with people involved in every facet of game design, from the producers to the programmers, the artists and 3D modelers to the level designers. The job almost literally paid me in peanuts (heh), but I’m glad I got the chance to do it. I even got my name in the credits of a couple forgettable Saturn and Playstation games, hehehe.

Mike "Scout" Gust06/04/2009

Helmut – I had a hand drawn map for Zork. It was about 5 sheets of graph paper taped together and I kept it with the game. I tossed it out a few years back during a move. Here’s a link to a cool Zork map I saw when putting this article together.

GregP – I still haven’t played Thief 3 or the Cradle level. It’s at the top of my list though. All those games you mentioned are faves of mine. I definitely need to get to the Cradle this summer!

Pokey and Lakerz – Thanks for reading the article. Maybe I’ll finally get a PlayStation and get back to ICO soon and actually finish it this time. Just looking at the pics in Google Image makes me want to play.

Thanks everyone for the nice words.

GregP06/04/2009

I was remiss in leaving out Morrowind in my list of favorite games; it was my first RPG, so the gameplay was entirely new to me, but looking back on it, it was the game world itself that so thoroughly drew me in. The architecture and environment just had some engrossing quality that sucked me in and would spit me out hours later. Your screenshot makes me remember those gaming sessions and stirs up a nostalgic feeling in me… Oblivion, though, did almost nothing for me, comparatively.

BTW did pick up the book last night – looks very, very cool, and I can’t wait to dive in. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

Ahhh, Morrowind. I remember when I first arrived in Balmora, the first time I played. It was late evening and the town windows were all lit up. There I stood on the Silt Strider platform, staring out over the town – with its semi-pueblo architecture – and knowing how many adventures and experiences lay ahead of me… it was one of Those Moments, you know, the ones of gaming that we always remember.

Scout: you’ll love the first half of Cradle. Not so much the second, but the first will rock your world. I do suggest playing the whole game, not just that level, because the sum of your past experiences in Thief 3 impact the experience of Shalebridge Cradle. Once you play I’m dying to hear your impressions.

Welcome to the site, GregP!

GregP06/08/2009

Update: I’m about halfway through Nitsche’s book, and I have to say it is almost suffocatingly academic – but for some reason I can’t put it down. Maybe because I am convinced that if I just keep reading, I’m going to get to the parts that I expected to be in there … some really enthralling discussion of what makes certain gamespaces so compelling (heh – perhaps in stringing the reader along with that expectation, his text is ITSELF the compelling device I so desire). Parts I and II have been almost entirely dedicated to defining terms and comparing games to literature and cinematic devices; Part III (coming up) promises to focus more on integrating it all and analyzing why certain combinations make more compelling gamespaces (I hope!).

On a somewhat related note, I finished Cryostasis last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The game uses a number of creative gameplay elements that keep the player interested, and the atmosphere really is quite engrossing.

To my tremendous irritation, Cryostasis isn’t running on my Windows 7 RC computer. Rather, it runs, but the screen’s blank. So I’m going to have to wait for a patch or new driver before I get back into it.

Mike "Scout" Gust06/08/2009

I read the introduction to Nitsche’s book and sort of got the feeling it was a dry read. In fact, one of the problems I hit when researching this topic was all the dessicated writing. It was partly in reaction to the academic tone that I started the piece with actual gameplay experiences.

Sorry the book didn’t deliver on its promise. It’s sort like that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” quote, I guess.

GregP06/15/2009

Update on the book: finished it over the weekend, and I cannot emphasize enough how unworthy this book was of my reading time. 🙂 Completely and totally academic and did not add a single idea or element to my understanding of ‘video game spaces.’ This seems suited to one who has never played a video game of any kind and wants to know how they can relate to architecture, literature, and cinema.

Oh well …

Lyrad05/19/2010

Whilst I thought the essay was well structured and presented, to me there’s still an area that I valued not covered deeply enough, particularly relating to the area of conceptual understanding.

I still firmly believe that graphics are receiving way too much attention than they are worth. The true worth of graphics is simply to support a concept, because as intelligent humans, we are conceptual creatures. It doesn’t take very long to ‘get an idea’, especially if it’s something visual. Once a graphical image is understood, the additional detail simply becomes exponentially irrelevant, and we -will- ignore it. This is why many gamers are happy putting with 2D avatars and crappy environments in the hopes that there is something else to look forward to.

If I see lots of clouds, leaves, trees, grass, water, lush hues and colour, I would go “oo, pretty”… for 5 minutes, and the only useful message I would get out of it would be “forest”. This is why I think a crew of 100 3D artists and 2 storywriters is a tragedy. The amount of effort spent making one forest could easily be spent on making something more meaningful and gratifying, like drama, purpose, style, mystery or a mushroom bigger than any man’s imagination.

Majority of this writing is based on the assumption that immersion is the key to all gaming experiences. Which I find sad, because I can think of many other games that I have enjoyed that didn’t care about immersion at all. I like immersion, but I think it is a confused term that isn’t always a good thing.

Immersion can mean driving realism into a situation until the rest of your senses dull and you are utterly convinced that you are in the specific situation. Lots of games make use of repetition to an insane degree to the point that you no longer enjoy the experience, .. but you are immersed in it. You are stressed and pissed off, and feeling all the emotions as you would in a situation where you were unhappy.

Engagement on the other hand means you are always mentally active, wondering “What is this?” “Why is that there?” “That’s strange.” “Omg, how did that happen?” “I wonder what happens if I do this..” “Ahh, I get it.” “HOLY SHIT, THIS COMPLETELY CHANGES EVERYTHING!” these are the thoughts that truly represent interaction. These are the kinds of situations where people are truly thinking, participating and investing. These kind of thoughts are derived from situations – Situations that don’t even need high level detail of graphics to pull off, just a creative mind and maybe some kind of mechanical understanding. Text will do.

So yeah, just thought I’d add the missing voice to the concept of graphics and the reason why gamers devalue it so much… no matter what Henry Jenkins says.

I agree with everything you said though I’m not convinced immersion and interactivity are exchangeable nouns for the same activity. I’m also not arguing for the triumph of graphics over story. I went to some pains to make that point. The article is exploring the little discussed phenomena of the experience of space during game play and secondarily the natural evolution from text to 3D.

I agree that any game can engage a gamer in the way you describe. I’ve had that special buzz with all kinds of games. Yes, text will do just fine.

Lyrad05/20/2010

“I’m also not arguing for the triumph of graphics over story. I went to some pains to make that point.”

I am aware, and I guess I wasn’t really trying to counter-argue you more than introduce a new perpsective into the subject.

This important concept is the human player.

I felt that comparing the human interpretation against any aspect of a game, such as graphics, gamespaces, music or mechanics can radically change value and effect. If players overlook gamespaces, game graphics or any detail, there usually is a reason for it. And that reason shouldn’t be dismissed without recognition and understanding.

Ultimately I felt game design stems more from psychology than simply architecture. Because I don’t think we are just trying to build something, but craft something meaningful and experiential. You could build a giant world to walk about, but I’d rather play a smaller world which enables me to fly, swim and dig in it. You could lay out elaborate architectured spaces, but I’m ultimately interested in how I can -break- that structure. The two subjects may seem be seemingly different, but I reckon they are but two confusing sides of the same coin that work in a balance.

So yeah, I probably didn’t write my last post that well and digressed a bit. Hopefully this one clarifies things a bit.

Good points and probably a couple more articles in what you are bring to the conversation.

Not sure if you can dismiss a major art form as “simply architecture” (not sure if you meant to either…) but it does highlight how little architecture is understood outside of the halls of architecture firms. I guess bad architecture is so ubiquitous we tend to see architecture just something to hold stuff. I think there is tremendous psychological power to a well designed space, real or virtual. It’s felt on a very instinctive level. I do think we are looking at separate facets of the same thing.

I really ought to link to this piece in my Suspension of Disbelief article because it summarises perfectly why simply moving through a virtual space is every bit as captivating as doing things in it. As I semi-skimmed down to your comment I remembered the Milkman Conspiracy level (semi-skimmed geddit?) in Psychonauts which is one of the finest level designs I’ve ever come across structurally and conceptually. If you haven’t played it, then I highly recommend you check it out, it’s superb.

Armand07/20/2010

Just wanted to let you know I completely enjoyed the article. I’m forwarding this page to some non-gamer friends.. let’s see if they’ll read it. : )

[…] For that short moment, fully immersed, I felt fear. On the power of imagination, a quote from an article Scout wrote last year: “No, it was the allure of that dark underground world unfolding before […]